Conservatives have a new celebrity spokesman-writer-thinker-philosopher. David Mamet, Pulitzer prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, movie director and sometime essayist, has come out of the closet.

No longer, he declares, is he a "brain-dead liberal." Now he's a wide-awake conservative. Some time after arriving in Hollywood, of all places, and at age 60, he engaged in a conversation with his Republican rabbi (where did he find one?), who gave him the books of conservative writers, such as Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Milton Friedman and Paul Johnson.

He had a dramatic political conversion.

Mamet re-evaluated his own heroes, starting with the playwright Bertolt Brecht, whom he now describes as "a show dog of communism," who theatrically criticized capitalism even as his royalties allowed him to live comfortably on capital deposited in a Swiss bank account. Karl Marx, he discovered, never earned his money, but mooched on Friedrich Engels' family, which may account for his ideas about how wealth should be distributed.

Mamet writes of his conversion to free market economics, his discovery of the errors of multiculturalism, in a new book titled, "The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture." He sounds like a latter-day Candide marooned in postmodern America, where liberals think they have all the answers for creating the "best of all possible worlds." He renders them as absurd as Dr. Pangloss, who saw even the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 as among "the best of all possible worlds."

"The great wickedness of Liberalism," Mamet discovered, "was that those who devise the ever-new state Utopias ... set out to bankrupt and restrict not themselves, but others."

Mamet first observes his own hypocrisy, recognizing the disconnect between how he acted and how he talked, "talking Left and living Right," which leads him to a collective indictment of himself and others in his generation of baby boomers, whose ideology has never quite been in sync with the real world they inhabit.

Wow, I'm pleasantly surprised. His plays and some of his movies are absolutely excellent.

Arroyo_Doble

06-10-2011, 12:52 PM

A History of the American People was awful.

Rockntractor

06-10-2011, 12:57 PM

A History of the American People was awful.

Don't worry Dolby, most of moon bat Hollywood is still on your side, that's good isn't it?:confused:

Arroyo_Doble

06-10-2011, 01:10 PM

Don't worry Dolby, most of moon bat Hollywood is still on your side, that's good isn't it?:confused:

I doubt they are on my side and to be honest, I really don't buy much of their product. The book I was refering to was written by Paul Johnson. One of the authors mentioned.

wilbur

06-10-2011, 11:24 PM

Mamet is the man..... Spartan and Red Belt... awesome movies...

The Unit - one of the best shows ever on TV (jumped the shark a bit as the seasons wore on though).

Given the nature of some of his works, especially The Unit, I'm not surprised he's conservative.

Odysseus

06-11-2011, 12:17 AM

Mamet is the man..... Spartan and Red Belt... awesome movies...

The Unit - one of the best shows ever on TV (jumped the shark a bit as the seasons wore on though).

Given the nature of some of his works, especially The Unit, I'm not surprised he's conservative.

Who are you and what have you done with Wilbur?

Rockntractor

06-11-2011, 12:20 AM

Who are you and what have you done with Wilbur?

I knew the whole brain dead liberal thing was way over done, he is actually a conservative plant!

nightflight

06-11-2011, 12:39 AM

I saw his book at B&N tonight; will probably buy it soon.

Gingersnap

06-11-2011, 01:10 AM

Given the nature of some of his works, especially The Unit, I'm not surprised he's conservative.

Apparently at some point he was himself surprised.

Elspeth

06-11-2011, 01:50 AM

Given the nature of some of his works, especially The Unit, I'm not surprised he's conservative.

Actually, given Oleanna, I'm not surprised.

I liked the first season of the Unit, although I recently talked to a guy who was in Special Ops and he said the book "Inside Delta Force" on which The Unit is based was a great book, but The Unit was not very accurate. This guy is an old timer, was in Special Ops in Vietnam, back when it was called something else.

MountainMan

06-11-2011, 01:52 AM

Wow, I'm pleasantly surprised. His plays and some of his movies are absolutely excellent.

He has been on Medved's, Hannity's and Rush's show this week.

Medved gave him the best interview since his transformation was similar to Mamet's.